Dynamic Range Of Vinyl Compared To Cd

1 for you techies out there cds have a sample rate of 44 1khz and a dynamic range of 16 bits.

Dynamic range of vinyl compared to cd.

16 bit cd digital audio has a technical dynamic range of 96 db though many argue the perceived range is higher when taking dithering into account. Vinyl records typically yield 55 65 db. That changed over time as mastering engineers were asked to take advantage of the. Lp s difference between maximum to average is around 11 56db compared against the cd recording at 11 11db and even the digital rip at 11 35db.

Yes vinyl was noisier. With the above in mind i began exploring why some vinyl records have greater dynamic range rightly concluding that mastering lay at the heart of the issue. Most songs start hard are hard in the middle and finish with a punch. Here lp actually wins over cd.

Now there are at times vinyl records that measure a better score on that site when compared to their cd counterpart but it s very rare. When i cut a master for vinyl and a cd master from the same digital master tape they sounded pretty much the same except for the noise floor. The dynamic range of vinyl when evaluated as the ratio of a peak sinusoidal amplitude to the peak noise density at that sine wave frequency is somewhere around 80 db. This genre of music naturally has very little dynamic range.

Thus the dynamic range is always going to be low. High resolution audio files can reach as high as 192khz 32 bit but are most often available at 96khz 24 bit. Dynamic range is the difference between the loudest signal and the noise floor. Vinyl s dynamic range is dependant on frequency because vinyl doesn t have a flat maximum output curve.

2 robert points out that in the early days of cd the mastering job for vinyl and digital was the same. Compared to vinyl record it was noticed that cd was far more revealing of the acoustics and ambient background noise of the recording environment. Pcm of any flavor has a flat response to fs.